At first I thought: no, too private, too intimate, and at the furthest end of the spectrum of what I want to know about Philip Larkin. This is for specialists only, surely: a 40-year correspondence with the woman he – well, it's an odd-sounding word when we use it of Larkin, but here it is – loved; filleted down from 1,421 letters, or 7,500 pages. And then there is the whole business of making more judgments about Larkin: give people a correspondence they were never a part of and they feel as though they are still entitled to pronounce. When it comes to Larkin's private life everyone seems to excuse, or indeed encourage, the urge to find fault: Larkin was weird, Larkin was miserable, he pissed and moaned too much (one or two reviewers have even found time to take a swipe at Monica Jones, the other, largely invisible, correspondent here) . . . I'm reminded of Martin Amis's unimprovable line on the biography: "In Andrew Motion's book, we have the constant sense that Larkin is somehow falling short of the cloudless emotional health enjoyed by, for instance, Andrew Motion."Well, there's plenty of ammunition for those who like to take pot-shots at the man. There's a poem in here about work which complains about working "till I kick the bucket; / FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT", which may lack the lyrical deftness of "Toads" but does have a similar essence; while his reaction to Betjeman's telling him he met Kingsley Amis and his wife "& had a long chat or some such nonsense" is to say "Grr, brr. They're all the same really. The only good life is to live in some sodding seedy city & work & keep yr gob shut & be unhappy." (In which case you could say that Larkin had a very good life indeed.) But he opened up to Monica, a woman as sharply funny as he was (her nickname for EM Forster, we learn, was "old Sell-Soul", which you have to love), and there are moments of great tenderness and insight here, even if this was not a conventionally happy relationship. You can imagine Monica's frustrations. She was a good-looking woman with, apparently, no shortage of offers , and miles from the man she loved. "Dear one, you are always in my thoughts – I love you and don't want you to be in any doubt of it." You don't have to be unusually sensitive to make a good stab at what prompted that sentence, that italicised "are". You can also see poems taking shape under your eyes. We can feel relief that "This Be the Verse" didn't use the word "foist", which he was contemplating (as in "they foist on you the faults they had" – it would have knocked half the stuffing out of the poem); and the last line of "An Arundel Tomb" went through several incarnations before finding its final, unimprovably ambiguous shape: "That what survives of us is love . . . All that survives of us is love . . ."Yes, there is the odd startling political opinion, the occasional moment when we are reminded that this is a man who, were we ignorant of his art, we might find hard to get along with; but there is certainly not so much of Larkin the misogynist, the one who complained elsewhere that "everything about the relationship between men and women makes me angry. It's all a fucking balls-up, it might have been planned by the army or the Ministry of Food." His relationship with Monica may have been a balls-up in one sense, but in another it was not: and if we are to use the privilege of peering into his private life with the proper respect we should demonstrate when being shown into someone else's bedroom, we can see concern, humanity, tenderness. The letters almost dwindle to a halt in 1973, because Larkin's mother moved into a nursing home in Leicester, where Monica lived. And they were with each other until the end of his life. That's not really a balls-up. And this is a proper correspondence, intelligent but easy, fluent, encouraging; we see the charm and the point of sitting down, at the end of the day, or the beginning of an evening, and putting one's thoughts into writing, and sending them off to someone we love.